We went back to my hometown with our baby who was born last year, and decided to visit Kibitsu Shrine in Okayama.

We gave Mame a millet dumpling, so she decided to accompany us.

For Mame, it’s the third time, and for our daughter who was born last year, it’s a first time visit to Okayama prefecture.

We go to Kibitsu Shrine on an important day as a family custom that is unwittingly fixed among us.
Along with it, we went for “Hyakunichi-mairi”, a ritual of visiting and praying at the same shrine a hundred times over a hundred days. It became a bustling outing with our nephews.

We had prayers for our daughter’s eternal health and it was the first spring storm and was very windy, so we had to quickly finish it in a rush even though we were supposed to enjoy touring around the shrine with navigation from my father, who self-entitles himself as a Kibitsu Shrine professional

Still, some kind of nostalgic feeling welled up inside me by witnessing the unchanged scenery of Kibitsu Shrine that I had visited many times when I was a little. There I saw myself in my daughter.

The time I went up the steep stairs to the main shrine led by my parent’s hand,
The gravel garden that makes a gritty sound when it’s stamped,
The well water I drank to purify myself, and even running around the long corridor,
These memories recollected a sense of my old days.

Like “The Legend of Momotarou” (folklore of Japan), he decided to accompany us, but he seemed to feel a little bit short on fun this time.

There was a much poorer boy Goro, a black-shiba dog who had to stay and look after the house.

●Kibitsu Shrinehttp://kibitujinja.com/
Kibitsu 931 Kita-ku, Okayama-shi, Okayama prefecture
It’s a leading grand shrine of Sanyodo (Southern mountain region) which is dedicated to Kibitsuhiko-no-mikoto (An ancient Japanese prince) as the main enshrined deity.

Kibitsuhiko-no-mikoto later became a model of “Legend of Momotaro”.
The national treasure of the Shrine honden is twice as large as Izumo-taisha following Yasaka shrine in Kyoto.
Kibitsu Shrine is famous for “Narikama Shinji”, a kind of fortune telling with using the sound of “kama” (a kind of kettle sound).